Realization

Many of us have experienced moments of sudden realization, when the pieces fall into place, seemingly of their own accord, and we arrive at an understanding, e. g. that the butler did it, or that I am in love with her. But because these moments entail a sense of a transition from unawareness to awareness, the suddenness is not an isolated instant, but involves a duration, albeit a rapid one. If such moments seem to be rare occurrences, it is not the type of event that is rare, only its dramaticness. For, all awareness is realization in its structure; all consciousness is fundamentally an ongoing convergent coming-to-awareness of this kind, a synthesis, as Kant puts it, a concrescence, as Whitehead calls it. But, because the latter two focus on the processing of information from the outer world, they miss the fundamental process of realization--kinesthesia, the ongoing confluence of the sensing of all our bodily activities, not merely of those of our external senses. If more Philosophers were peripatetic, their theories of sense perception might not abstract so easily an analysis of e. g. the awareness of visual objects, from that of walking. Or, to put it in Kantian terminology, the structure of kinesthesia is the 'transcendental a priori' of consciousness. As can also be noticed in those moments of dramatic realization, the awareness comes at the end of the process, is a product of the confluence, which confirms Whitehead's thesis that consciousness is arrived at, not pre-given. On the other hand, his concomitant thesis, that the terminal point of a concrescence is a novel 'I', is shown to be inaccurate by those examples. For, the 'I' that we arrive at upon realization is not so much absolutely new, but the result of the incorporation of the new experience into what had been the preceding 'I', demonstrating that with every new experience, one grows, to a greater or lesser degree.